Noise Complaints
by MoonlitRamblings
Summary: Emma and Regina have both had it up to here: Regina with whoever keeps making that racket in the apartment below her and Emma with whoever keeps lodging bogus complaints about her with the super. Ridiculously late entry for Swan Queen Week, Day One: Meet-Cute AU


Noise Complaints

Summary: Emma and Regina have both had it up to here: Regina with whoever keeps making that racket in the apartment below her and Emma with whoever keeps lodging bogus complaints about her with the super. Ridiculously late entry for Swan Queen Week, Day One: Meet-Cute AU

A/N: Technically was for Swan Queen Week, Meet Cute AU, beyond late so now basically just a general Meet Cute AU story. Kinda. It got co-oped into something more complicated, but still totally stand alone so... More notes on that at the end. Hope you like it.

-/-

Regina had just settled down on her couch, book in hand and soft music playing, for her first peaceful night all week only to be interrupted by a loud banging on her front door. She glared so fiercely in the direction of the noise that there seemed to be a good chance whoever was on the other side of the door might burst into flames.

Unfortunately, nothing happened beyond a brief pause and then more banging. Regina huffed as she stuffed her bookmark back into her book and strode to the door, anger building with each step. She didn't even bother looking through the peek hole before she whipped the door open.

The younger woman was caught off guard by sudden Regina's appearance, not having expected the occupant to open the door so abruptly or for the one in this particular apartment to be only a few years older than her and so attractive. She'd been expecting someone significantly older and crotchetier, given the reason she'd come. Flashing brown eyes quickly reminded her of her own anger and why she had come here. "What the hell is your problem?" she demanded before the older woman had a chance to speak.

"My problem?" Regina asked incredulously, eyeing the pretty and yet obviously very angry young woman in front of her incredulously. "Currently, my problem is the strange woman banging on my door and disturbing my evening." She kept her eyes narrowed in a glare as she tried the mentally skewer the other woman for disturbing her evening.

Emma scoffed, "Oh, don't give me that. You know perfectly well why I'm here and I don't know what I did to piss you off in the first place, but I do know that getting me kicked out of the building is way over the top."

Regina scowled, "I assure you I have no idea what you're referring to." She didn't even know this woman, why would she have tried to get her kicked out of their building?

"Oh, really?" Emma asked sarcastically as she folded her arms over her chest. "So it's some _other_ lady in 402 that's been sending noise complaints about me to the super for the past month?"

"_You're_ the person who lives in 302?" Regina raised a brow. She had indeed submitted the complaints, but she had expected the offender to be an overgrown frat boy—not the casual but confident woman in her early twenties she saw before her. Still, what 302's resident looked like didn't matter to her and she found her own frustration with the person who'd been disturbing her. "In that case, I know _exactly_ who you are."

Emma huffed at this acknowledgment, "Yeah, well, I don't know what your deal is but this is beyond ridiculous."

"I quite agree," Regina said mildly before her words grew sharp edges. "Why you feel the need to blast music at all hours and have loud, and apparently unsatisfying, sex while I try to sleep after a long day of work, I have no idea, but your choice to do what you want with your life ends when it starts to interfere with the quality of my own. "

Emma gritted her teeth to stop the insults and swear words from escaping. She was good at reading people and she knew, despite the personal satisfaction she would get from saying them, words like that would get her nowhere with this angry, but ultimately sophisticated woman. Although the sex comment did mess with that image at least a little, what had that even meant?

Regardless, she needed to calm down. She breathed out and tried to focus on her confusion about the brunette's insistence on her claims being true instead of her anger. "You have some guts to say that to my face. You know these complaints are just made-up bullshit because you've decided to hate me for no reason."

"Excuse me?" Regina asked, offended at the notion she would do such a thing and the woman's own denial. "They most certainly are not. At least once a week, my sleep is disturbed by an obnoxious amount of noise coming from beneath my bedroom floor."

Emma opened her mouth to continue arguing when a sudden thought hit her, triggered the fact that she finally realized her internal lie-detector wasn't pinging at all and by Regina's specificity. "Under your bedroom?"

"Yes."

Emma peered in, scoping out the apartment, ignoring Regina's outraged expression. It was larger than her own, and the door had been farther down the hall than her own… "Is your bedroom that way, by any chance?" she guessed with a dawning realization as she pointed even further down the hall from the direction she'd come from.

Regina narrowed her eyes in suspicion at the change in the younger woman's demeanor. "As a matter of fact, it is. Why?"

Emma didn't answer her question. "Fifth floor has the penthouse, right? Just the one person or family or whoever lives there, yeah?"

"Yes," Regina replied irritably. "What does that have to do with anything?"

"This floor only has two apartments on it, doesn't it?"

"Of course it does," Regina was getting tired of the woman's seemingly random questions. "Just like the rest of the building."

"No, actually," Emma said. She gave Regina a look, "There are four apartments on my floor. 301 to 304."

"Fascinating. I fail to see how—" Regina cut herself off as her mind caught up with what the blonde was saying. She mentally pictured the building and what that might mean.

"302 isn't directly below me," she states flatly. "303 and 304 are." Emma nods. "And since the sound only comes from under half of my apartment," And she had noticed that—she remembered being vindictively glad no sound disturbed her in her study, "304 is the one making all the noise, isn't it?"

"It's not me." Emma tried to think of who lived at the end of the hall. Her brow furrowed when she did and she grimaced. "Right, Jones lives there. Used to hit on me whenever I saw him. Goes out drinking—a lot. I think he's in a band, kept trying to give me CDs. Took one once just to get him to leave me alone—loud stuff. It was telling him I thought his music was crap that made him finally leave me alone."

Regina just stood there, a look on her face that said she was trying to process what they'd realized. She frowned, thinking everything over a second time before coming to a decision. "Right then," she said, glancing at her watch. "Come along, Miss…"

Emma was caught off guard by the 180 in demeanor. "Uh, Swan. Emma Swan."

The brunette gave a nod. "Regina Mills. Come along, Miss Swan."

To Emma's complete surprise, she stepped out of her apartment and locked the door behind her. Emma was still staring as the older woman began striding purposefully down the hall. "Wha… Hey, wait up, where are we going?"

"Mr. Zimmer should be in his office for another hour and I intend to get this all sorted out immediately."

"Oh. Oh! Awesome. Yeah. Good. Let's go."

-x-x-x-

While they waited for the elevator to come, Emma found she had to ask, "What was with the sex comment?"

"Hm?" Regina asked, distracted with berating herself for not checking everything out thoroughly before submitting her complaints and her annoyance with the overreaching issue. She was going to get all of this straightened out tonight she thought decisively as they stepped inside. "Oh? Mr. Jones's bedroom must be below my own. His amorous activities are quite loud. However, the female participation often seems rather…false."

Emma laugh out loud at that, "I knew he was all talk. So glad I passed on that." She looked at Regina sidelong as something occurred to her, "And how do you know so much about faking it?"

Regina returned her sidelong glance, seemingly coming back into the moment instead of focusing on what she wanted to tell the superintendent. A rather smug smirk spread across her lips, "Oh, not much at all. On the other hand, I do know quite a bit about how it sounds when a woman is actually enjoying herself."

Emma's eyebrows lifted in surprise at the comment, both because she thought Regina was too proper or something to say such a thing and because Emma hadn't been getting much vibe from her besides 'angry'. It hadn't crossed her mind yet what her sexuality might be. In the end, Emma just rolled her eyes, smiling faintly. "Someone's full of themselves."

Regina's smirked grew rather wicked. "Why shouldn't one act confident when they know they should be?" she asked rhetorically.

The elevator doors opened then and Regina sauntered out, leaving Emma staring after her for beat before she hurried to catch up. Damn.

-x-x-x-

It only took a half an hour to meet with the superintendent. Mr. Zimmer accepted the correction easily, especially since Regina was extremely vehement about the retraction and he had personally gotten Emma her spot in his building.

It also turned out that not only had the couple in 303 complained about Jones, but so had the people below him. Mr. Zimmer assured Regina, quailing slightly under her intense stare, that her complaints were the final nail in the coffin and only asked that he be given a couple weeks to find a new tenant. Regina agreed to give him two weeks and that was that.

The pair stepped back into the elevator, satisfied but slightly awkward now that the mess had been cleared up. "Miss Swan…" Regina began reluctantly.

"Emma," the blonde corrected absently. She was pretty happy with how this all had turned out—no more complaints on her file, Jones was going be evicted, and she was no longer in danger of getting kicked out of the awesome apartment she'd managed to get after helping Mr. Zimmer find his kids.

"Emma," Regina amended and something about the brunette saying her name made Emma turn to pay more attention. The older woman looked extremely uncomfortable, "I owe you an apology. I should have investigated which apartment had been causing the disturbance much more thoroughly."

Emma smiled and shrugged, "Its okay. It was just a mistake."

"Still." Regina did not like to feel like she owed. "I would like to make it up to you in some way, after all the fuss this stirred up."

"Really, you don't have to—" She was cut off by an extremely loud gurgle from her stomach and blushed. "Sorry. Missed lunch chasing a guy on the other side of town and then I got home to see the letter from Michael about the noise and I just went straight upstairs so I haven't had dinner yet."

Regina's eyes lit up, "How about you join me for dinner? I always end up making too much—recipes often are designed for more than one person."

The elevator dinged as they opened up onto the third floor, but neither woman moved. "I wouldn't want to—."

"I insist, Miss Swan," Regina said firmly, in a tone that suggested the matter was already settled. "I'm making lasagna. Would you eat that?"

Emma snorted, "I eat just about anything."

"Perfect." Regina leaned forward, closing the doors of the elevator and sending them up to her own floor.

"I stopping having a say in this a little while ago, didn't I?" Emma observed, not that she was really one to argue with free food, like ever.

"Yes."

Emma rolled her eyes as she followed Regina down the hall and muttered under her breath, "Geez, so bossy." She could tell Regina had heard her though and, despite only knowing the other woman for an hour, she knew Regina was smirking.

-/-

A/N: As I hinted at in the first note, while this started out as a basic meet cute idea for SQW it eventually got merged with a multi-chapter story idea I have where it serves as the prologue for how they met. that story will take place nearly a year later and it shouldn't have a ton of impact beyond generally setting up their vague ages (early and late twenties for Emma and Regina respectively) and that they live in the same apartment building. I have high hopes for finishing this larger story and posting it (but we all know how that normally goes, plus i got like ten of those so...) Anyway, mainly just me rambling here. Finishing S&amp;W before any other big story starts getting posted, but I might post little pieces of future longer stories on tumblr-gonna try to make that happen but we'll see.

Thanks for reading and, as always, leave reviews to let me know what you think!


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